The controversy continues to rage around Kathy Sierra's experience being threatened in frightening ways in blog comments on her blog and at a couple of other blogs as well.
The less friction in an environment, the more given it is to cascades. Lets not forget the flame wars famous in email before people internalized a better understanding of the new medium of communication (not that flame wars are altogether gone...).
In the case of mass activities like blogging, the rules of mob cascades surely apply. Everybody ought to read the great book by Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, and I'm sure many of you have, and think about it in the context of the Web.
Looks like Kathy Sierra had sufficient reason to feel both over-attacked and even frightened for her life. Sufficient in the sense that such fear cannot be expected to be "rational", whatever that means, but comes when it comes. I have no problem, for example, with her initiating a police investigation. That's what they're for, and they'll find what they find.
On the other hand, Kathy used the same cascading medium to characterize people she had no specific reason to think were responsible for these specific remarks and, by association, many others as well. Fear and imagination cause that. Chris Locke and I have known each other for more than a decade, but the ways we know each other, the ways many of us know one another, are rather more partial, rather less well-inscribed socially than a similar human relationship would likely have been only a generation ago. This renders such relationships more fragile than otherwise they would be. In any particular case (Chris and mine for example), it makes no difference, affects nothing. But in the aggregate, en masse, it definitely does. Chris will be affected, harmed; maybe someone will even threaten him? Not unheard of.
So, we have an ugly situation on our hands, and what exactly is likely to defuse it? I don't expect to see a global reasoning about the mores of blogging, as Mitch Ratcliffe calls for -- not that it would be unwelcome! It would be most welcome. But, it's harder to achieve such a thing than for the ugliness to continue. Indeed, in this as in most situations, ugliness and extremism drown out most attempts at reason.
One would like to mean, as Arthur C. Clarke did, something positive via the phrase "Childhood's End." Not usually, and not this time.
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The less friction in an environment, the more given it is to cascades. Lets not forget the flame wars famous in email before people internalized a better understanding of the new medium of communication (not that flame wars are altogether gone...).
In the case of mass activities like blogging, the rules of mob cascades surely apply. Everybody ought to read the great book by Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, and I'm sure many of you have, and think about it in the context of the Web.
Looks like Kathy Sierra had sufficient reason to feel both over-attacked and even frightened for her life. Sufficient in the sense that such fear cannot be expected to be "rational", whatever that means, but comes when it comes. I have no problem, for example, with her initiating a police investigation. That's what they're for, and they'll find what they find.
On the other hand, Kathy used the same cascading medium to characterize people she had no specific reason to think were responsible for these specific remarks and, by association, many others as well. Fear and imagination cause that. Chris Locke and I have known each other for more than a decade, but the ways we know each other, the ways many of us know one another, are rather more partial, rather less well-inscribed socially than a similar human relationship would likely have been only a generation ago. This renders such relationships more fragile than otherwise they would be. In any particular case (Chris and mine for example), it makes no difference, affects nothing. But in the aggregate, en masse, it definitely does. Chris will be affected, harmed; maybe someone will even threaten him? Not unheard of.
So, we have an ugly situation on our hands, and what exactly is likely to defuse it? I don't expect to see a global reasoning about the mores of blogging, as Mitch Ratcliffe calls for -- not that it would be unwelcome! It would be most welcome. But, it's harder to achieve such a thing than for the ugliness to continue. Indeed, in this as in most situations, ugliness and extremism drown out most attempts at reason.
One would like to mean, as Arthur C. Clarke did, something positive via the phrase "Childhood's End." Not usually, and not this time.
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